Plant Scaffolds Support Motor Recovery and Regeneration in Rats after Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT As of yet, no standard of care incorporates biomaterials to treat traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI). However, intense development of biomaterials for treating SCI has focused on fabricating microscale channels to support the regrowth of axons while minimizing scar formation. We previously demonstrated that plant tissues could be decellularized and processed to form sterile, biocompatible and implantable biomaterials that support cell infiltration and vascularization in vivo . Vascularized plant tissues contain continuous microscale channels with geometries relevant for supporting neural regeneration. We hypothesized that decellularized vascular bundles would support neural regeneration and motor recovery in SCI. Sprague Dawley rats received a complete T8-T9 spinal cord transection and were implanted with acellular plant-derived scaffolds and allowed to recover over 28 weeks. Animals that received the scaffolds alone, with no other therapeutic compounds, demonstrated a significant and stable partial improvement in motor function compared to control animals as early as week 4 post-injury. Hind-limb motor function did not deteriorate over the remaining 28 weeks. Histological analysis revealed minimal astrocyte scarring at the spinal cord - scaffold interface, aligned axonal projection through the scaffolds, populations of serotonergic neurons and Schwann cells, laminin and collagen deposition and the presence of blood vessels. Axonal reconnection via the scaffold was also confirmed by Fluro-gold retrograde tracing. Taken together, our work defines a novel route for building upon naturally occurring plant microarchitectures to support the repair of the spinal cord post-injury. Notably, these results were achieved without the use of growth factors, stem/progenitor cells, or any other interventions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".